Ubuntu Error Tracker data retention

[Brian Murray]

On Fri, May 13, 2022 at 10:29:30AM +0930, Alex Murray wrote:
> On Thu, 2022-05-12 at 13:38:38 -0700, Brian Murray wrote:
> 
> > The Ubuntu Error Tracker receives crash reports from all releases of
> > Ubuntu which are not out of standard support. These crash reports are
> > then aggregated into buckets where some meta-information (package
> > version and release of Ubuntu) about those crash reports is collected.
> > The crash data in the Ubuntu Error Tracker is kept until the release
> > reaches its end of standard support, however not all the data from each
> > individual crash gets scrubbed and there is still some detailed
> > information for crashes from releases as old as Ubuntu 12.04.
> >
> > I plan on changing this policy so that all the information from
> > individual crash reports (basically what is in the .crash file) is
> > removed when the release reaches its end of standard support. That would
> > mean that all the information for crashes from Ubuntu 21.10 would be
> > removed in July of 2022 and for Ubuntu 18.04 it would be removed in
> > April of 2023. Keeping in mind that a crash bucket would still indicate
> > that old release and package version were affected are there any
> > objections to this change in data retention?
> 
> We are now supporting LTS releases for 5 additional years via ESM and so
> from the security team's perspective 16.04 will be supported* until 2026
> and 18.04 until 2028. I can imagine it would be useful to still have
> error reports retained and collected for these releases during this ESM
> period to help identify any possible regressions introduced via ESM
> security updates.
> 
> So as a general rule, for the LTS releases can we please retain and
> support them in the Ubuntu Error Tracker for 10 years?

I don't think having an individual crash report from 2016 would be
useful in 2021, let alone in 2026. How would the security team feel
about keeping the individual crashes for a maximum of 5 years?

--
Brian Murray